Tag Archives: climate change

On Taxing the Sun

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https://www.kqed.org/perspectives/201601141773/andrew-lewis-taxing-the-sun

The latest on KQED. And of course there are lots of nuances to the current situation, far more than can fit in 300 words. But I’d love to discuss if any one has questions.

In 1696, a British government desperate for revenue imposed a tax on windows. In response, the English people chose to board up their houses, closing themselves in darkness. Windows allow sunlight and fresh air into homes. The sun and light belong not to us, one might reason, but to God. How could any people in their right mind tax God?

In 2011, frustrated by governmental inaction over climate change, our family decided to do what we could to help transition our beloved state to a clean energy future. We paid dearly to install a 7-kilowatt hour solar system. It would power our house. And it would power our car. Any excess power was sent back onto the grid to be consumed by our neighbors before it even reached the end of our block. 

In 2022, PG&E and other utilities have pushed forward a plan with the California Public Utility Commission that would penalize homeowners for installing solar panels. These new rules would allow bad-faith actors to once again monopolize power generation. Under the new rules, a family such as ours, which uses little power from the grid, and in fact provides power to others, would now be charged an additional $600 per year. 

Not much, it seems has changed between 1696 and 2022. By taxing homeowners for installing solar panels, the CPUC plan would punish average citizens, taxing them for that which is freely given by nature. They would, you might say, be levying a fine against God. Rather than moving us toward a clean energy future, our utility companies that are supposed to serve, instead are leading us into darkness.

With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.

A Wing and A Prayer

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The radio version is here.

She lay on her side on the pavement. When we found her, she had already been flapping in vain for hours, baking in the unseasonable heat.

My mother-in-law had planted milkweed in the hope of attracting Monarchs. And it had worked. The butterflies came and fluttered about for days. They lay eggs that hatched into larvae that were eaten or disappeared.

But one was different. She had found her way onto a wall where she had spun a chrysalis and had hung silent until this morning when a beautiful wet winged Monarch had emerged.

During the day, though, something had gone wrong. Her wings were not tucked properly and she could not fly.Sponsored

I considered how if given a chance, in her own short life she could accomplish more, proportionally, than I ever would. She would travel unimaginable distances, buffeted by wind and rain and smoke toward a destination she had never known.

We stopped what we were doing and picked her up and nestled her in some milkweed. She allowed us to reset her wing. She clambered weakened, her wings now erect. We left her in the garden shade.

By the evening she had died.

Saddened, I sat in the warm dark. I thought of this fragile miracle that survives less often than not. These gossamer things journey the length of the Americas. The Monarch is not a butterfly. She’s a system, comprised of wing, and plant and wind and temperature and even ourselves. And when the system works, the migration, the annual improbable pulse of life continues. And that pulse is now threatened. But like her, we still have to try, I thought. We have to stop. We have to observe. We have to listen.

With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.

Gene Therapy for a Fevered Planet

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Greta ThunbergAt a recent North Bay Bob Dylan tribute, I met a biochemist who manufactured blood proteins to treat hemophilia,.  As we talked, however, she announced that one day her work would go away.  

She explained that blood coagulant requires twelve distinct proteins.  The genomes of hemophiliacs, it turns out, are unable to manufacture number eight.  But it’s now possible to engineer a virus that contains the missing gene sequence.  And if we introduce the virus to hemophiliac bone marrow, the DNA will repair and gain the ability to manufacture the missing protein.  It all sounded miraculous and strange.  

Musicians took up their instruments and the lilting chime of Mr. Tambourine Man filled the room.  

Fifteen months ago, a young Greta Thunberg left school and held a sign outside the Swedish Parliament. She stood alone. Skolstrejk för Klimatet her sign read.  

A year later, millions of young people around the globe struck for climate change. 

In this long hot summer without precedence in human history, it feels indeed as if our planet is burning with fever.  And yet I feel tremendous hope.   I marvel at the mechanisms by which the genome of the body politic can repair itself.  Change does not come just through governmental edict, but can sometimes begin with a single act.  Any small act taken by any one of us. We need not wait to take those small, but necessary and infectious steps — gene therapy, if you will — that will allow our children to have a future.   

We need a system change, rather than individual change, Thunburg said to the body of the UN.

But we cannot have one without the other.

To do your best is no longer enough.

We must all do the seemingly impossible.

Everything needs to change.

And it has to start today.

With a perspective, this is Andrew Lewis

https://www.kqed.org/perspectives/201601139098/gene-therapy-for-the-planet

Hay Fever (and climate change)

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It’s not the hay, though.  It’s the ragweed.  Ambrosia artemesiifolia or Ambrosia psilostachya, both from the Sunflower family.

I’ve had ever-worsening allergies here at Hopi for the last five years or so.  Last summer was the pits – Kerry even had to give me a lift to Flagstaff (my eyes were swollen shut) just to escape the pollen.  Keep in mind, I’ve never had allergies until now.

The cause?  As best I can tell it’s the ragweed.  And the Russian thistle (a brush against the plant causes my arms to break out).  And also perhaps lodgepole pine (up at Vail the second week of June, I’m a runny, congested mess).

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  We’ve all heard it.  And we all have allergies.

Which is my point exactly.  In the last few years, it seems that everyone here is walking around with itchy red eyes, swollen faces, and congested sinus.  Hopi Health Care ER is full of it.  And this year I’ve done my own informal survey, asking every checkout clerk in Flag, every person in a chance conversation, etc. if they have allergies.  The answer has been uniform, 100%.  Yes.  But not like this.  Or not until now.  Or never this early.  Or it is way worse then I’ve ever experienced.  100%.  Not one person (out of perhaps 100) answered differently.

Hmm.

I asked the pharmacist in Walgreens about it.  “There’s probably some pollen or something in the air that they’re allergic to,” she said.

Now there’s a waste of eight years of education.

What’s interesting is to have a widespread allergic response at Hopi.  They’re an isolated, genetically uniform population that have been living in this environment for over two thousand years.  By now folks would have either adapted to allergens native to the environment.  Or if they had always been this severe,  I doubt people would have settled here in the first place.

So at a birds eye view, what’s going on?  Non-native invasive species (ragweed and russian thistle) have moved in.  But that happened with grazing and land disturbance at least a hundred years ago.  What’s happened in the last few years?  It could be diet or lifestyle related – think homeopathy.  Bodies were once able to cope with local allergens because folks spent most of each day out on the land and had exposure year round, as well as consuming micro quantities through the local food.  Now people are holed up inside in cubicles or watching TV at home.  But it still doesn’t quite add up.

The best answer through my lense came from Bill McKibben a few weeks ago in his book Eaarth.  It’s climate change.  According to McKibben, a recent study showed that ragweed grows 10% taller and puts out 60 percent more pollen with increasing temperatures. Ten of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last 13 years.  In addition, the pollen season has extended because the growing season is longer.  And ragweed pollen can travel hundreds of miles.  It doesn’t need to be growing here.

What holds true for ragweed may hold true for other plants.  A friend who was in Beaver Creek this last month (and is normally not prone to extreme allergies) was a mess.  She described walking through “storms of pollen raining through the air”.

Which means climate change isn’t going to just result in trivial disasters like super cell storms, class 5 hurricanes, severe flooding in the upper and lower midwest, 365 straight days of rain in Columbia, and massive tornados wiping out Joplin Missouri.

All of our eyes will be swollen and itching, too.

 

Disaster’s Playing Field

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Two nights ago, I lay awake at 2 am listening to the howling wind. It was hot and dry, and blowing at night no less. Usually the winds die down by dusk. Even more importantly, this stuff is supposed to be done with by the middle of May. This year, we’re coming up on July and the wind is still blowing relentlessly.

If this is just an abnormal year, that’s totally fine. Abnormal means we have a normal to return to. Some year’s it’s hot. Some it’s cool. In the end it all works out. But if this (or something like it) is the new normal, I believe we may be in trouble. Here, unless you’re really good you can’t successfully dry farm under these conditions.

Dry farmers in this part of the Plateau depend on the pulse of moisture that arrives in January and February. If you’re lucky it soaks in and permeates deep layers of clay. If you’re even more lucky, you get a light pulse of rain in April or May that will jump start the seeds when you put them in. Even when the winds hit in May, the corns are well enough adapted to withstand it.

But when the winds blow through June, you can’t even get out there to plant. And if you do, the old moisture is evaporating so quickly out of the soil that the tap roots may not be able to chase it down fast enough. And if the winds blow through July, well, hardly any plant can survive that.

Or rather, they can if it comes upon them slowly. Technically speaking, dry land farming is, in part, about applying gradual selective pressure to seed stock so that over time it can evolve to withstand extreme environmental conditions. But that’s not what’s going on. Last year, the winds quit at the beginning of June. Now it’s four weeks later. Plants may not be able to adapt quickly enough.

If this is the first sign of our agriculture being suddenly bludgeoned to death, we can’t stand on the sidelines. Now’s the time to jump onto the playing field. Why? Because extreme conditions breed extreme diversity. You see it in edge ecologies – biomes that exist on the edge of a stable ecosystem evolve much more quickly with far stranger and exotic and powerful results.

This morning I was out hoeing and I caught sight of my Hopi neighbor watering his corn. It’s pretty much a daily routine for him, almost to the point where you might as well consider it aquaculture. I have to hand it to him, though. One, he’s farming. A lot of people are not. Two, he cares enough to keep his stuff alive at all cost. Three, he’s been maniacal about keeping his yard clear of ragweed and Russian thistle (which few people do around here). I’m highly allergic to both and his house is upwind of mine, so he’s graciously saving me from a huge autumn headache.

We’re growing for completely different things, though. He’s growing for corn. I, on the hand, am growing for resilience and strength. I don’t need a hundred ears. I just need few. In general, I’m not watering. On the worst wind days I’ve applied a cup or two of water just to keep a few of the plants alive. I don’t even necessarily want to keep them all alive, just the strongest. Let the environment dish out everything that it can. The few plants that survive, why, they’ll be the ones. I want something capable of a deep taproot and extreme resilience in the face of catastrophic wind. Overall, this kind of farming/gardening is a terrifying tightrope to balance.

Hopi corns are very smart. Smarter even than a lot of people I know. It figures out conditions quickly and responds physically just as fast. But even so, I fear the conditions may be changing even faster. I need to goose my plants just enough for them to stay alive, but not too much to drive them out of the race.

In the face of a looming disaster, our human lives may depend on it.

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The Bowl and the Spoon

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This year they’ve declared Mountain Film, a zero waste festival. That means I’m carrying a small canvas bag containing a cup, a plate, and a utensil. The initiative came directly from the screening of Bag It last year. Since then the presence of any single use disposable in my life has come to feel like a mortal rather than a venal sin.

I’m grateful to the festival for upping the ante. We’re all grownups, after all. They don’t need to give us plastic chum. They can ask us to bring our own plates and we should be able to figure it out. Stores can stop giving out bags and we’ll get it.

But their policy summons even greater questions and action. Candidate rules to live by:

1. Don’t buy anything. Ever again. In my life. Why should I? I live at the top of the food chain in the richest country in the world in the twenty-first century. What possibly could I need or want?

2. Don’t buy food unless I’m hungry. Truly hungry. Am I eating because I need to or because I want to? And if I want it, do I really want it?

3. Try to see the whole life of the food. Where did it come into being? How was it harvested? How did it come to me? Eat only those plants and creatures that I know.

4. Substitute human energy for fossil energy. This is a big one. Where can we use our hands and bodies and not rely on the grid?

5. When it gets dark let it be dark. Darkness is a gift from the universe. Why mask it with light? What a colossal waste.

6. Be where I am. Why talk with someone far away rather than the person right next to me? And why look in a device rather than the vista ahead? How much energy could we save if we weren’t trying so hard to be somewhere else?

7. Think twice before flipping a switch. Any switch. Every switch incrementally warms the world.

Anything anybody would care to add?